I confess. It’s easier not to write. I got off schedule during the last week of school because after working on an end-of-year computer requirement that involved writing for at least 8 hours each day I was, quite frankly, tired of looking at the computer. In fact, if I remember correctly, when I got home that Thursday night, I was so tired of everything that I plopped onto the couch and didn’t move for over three hours. Then I went to Florida to surprise non-internet using G-mama, to kid-sit Griffin the Nephew and Amelia the Niece, and on family vacation where internet connection was hit or miss. I could have written each of those nights. It was possible. But, like I said, it’s easier not to write. It’s easier not to do things that take time, discipline, vulnerability, and sacrifice.
Honestly, I’ve given serious thought to discontinuing these Monday and Thursday posts. I started writing them six years ago as a means of letting people know that those of us in full-time vocational ministry were not super-humans but regular-humans that experience life just like everyone else, and while I ended my work in full-time vocational ministry 2012, I’ve kept writing. I’ve kept writing because I knew it was a discipline that was good—a simple spiritual discipline of sorts—not a spiritual discipline listed in Foster’s Celebration of Discipline—but a discipline nonetheless. Yet many times my non-super-human self finds itself wondering, “What’s the point of posting each week? I don’t have anything profound to say. I write about Bullet and my family and school most of the time. And when I do write something spiritually or emotionally significant, most people don’t read it, so why put the words out there? Why not just stop?”
Before Mister Pastor Patrick announced that he and his family were returning home to live in Texas, he had scheduled yesterday and next Sunday as vacation time and asked my dad to fill the pulpit on those two Sundays. So my dad spoke yesterday and preached about freedom—about a people’s challenge to use their freedom not to take care of themselves and build up their own riches but to honor God and take care of one another.
In setting up the sermon for the children, Rebecca the Children’s Minister asked the children to recite the last line of The Star Spangled Banner: “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” She told the kids that even though we are each free to do pretty much anything we want to do—as long as we don’t break the law—we, as Christ-followers, are challenged to do things that are good and right and of God—and those things often take bravery.
As I write tonight, fireworks are going off around me. Bullet is petrified but hundreds of thousands of people around the country are celebrating freedom. I am grateful. And I am challenged to uphold and share a message of freedom to the people of every tribe, nation, and tongue, for the freedom that dominates my heart and mind tonight is a freedom that transcends tribe, nation, and tongue.
You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other…[And] the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit (--excerpts from Galatians 5).
Freedom. Love. Patience. Self-control. Discipline. Bravery.
I could stop writing. It would be so easy to stop writing. Life would go on and the world would keep turning. Yet on this Independence Day as I recognize that I am fortunate to have the freedom to pretty much do as I please, I also recognize that freedom is not free and that it comes with a call to be greater than myself. It comes with a call to be brave and to live by the Spirit that once called and continues to call me to walk this journey of faith with those around me…together…sacrificially…with discipline…and Love.
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